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Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening–until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots. Friendship, compassion, and the chance for great love lead the characters to forget the real danger that has been set in motion and cannot be stopped.

Nov. 15, 1958. An arctic-like blizzard roars out of nowhere across the mild desert terrain of southern Arizona. Boy scouts are feared caught out in the open, perhaps buried under the three to seven feet of snowfall in the mountains. Cowboys urge their horses through the chest high snow, hikers push through monster snowdrifts, and helicopters hover at dangerous altitudes in their struggle to find the boys before they die.

No Reading Guide?Book Club Queen – General Discussion Questions for NonfictionLitLovers – More General Questions for Nonfiction Books

Born to the life of an educated Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given a choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone he loves in hopes of finding health in the West. Young, scared, lonely and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier in time for an economic crash. Soon he’s gambling professionally and living with a high-strung Hungarian whore who insists that they follow the money to Dodge City.

Reading Guides:Random House – Includes a Letter from the Author and Discussion QuestionsAuthor’s Website – Includes additional discussion questions from the author.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.

Giving a ride to a snowbound stranger who offers them a lucrative sum in exchange, a recently engaged couple is thrown into a nightmarish situation when the stranger dies in their back seat with more than two million dollars in his possession.

Liesel Meminger is only nine years old when she is taken to live with the Hubermanns, a foster family, on Himmel Street in Molching, Germany, in the late 1930s. She arrives with few possessions, but among them is The Grave Digger’s Handbook, a book that she stole from her brother’s burial place. During the years that Liesel lives with the Hubermanns, Hitler becomes more powerful, life on Himmel Street becomes more fearful, and Liesel becomes a fullfledged book thief. She rescues books from Nazi book-burnings and steals from the library of the mayor. Liesel is illiterate when she steals her fi rst book, but Hans Hubermann uses her prized books to teach her to read. This is a story of courage, friendship, love, survival, death, and grief. This is Liesel’s life on Himmel Street, told from Death’s point of view.

Rural Wisconsin, 1907. In the bitter cold, wealthy businessman Ralph Truitt stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who has answered his advertisement for “a reliable wife.” But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she’s not the “simple, honest woman” Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, but her plan is simple: she will win this man’s devotion, then slowly poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on is that Truitt has a plan of his own for his new wife.

Reading Guide:LitLovers – Includes a Summary, Book Reviews, Author Bio, and Discussion Questions

Rachel, whose mother is Danish and father is African-American, loses both her parents and is forced to move to a new city to live with her strict African-American grandmother, but when she is immersed into an African-American community, her physical appearance draws attention and Rachel struggles with her own uncertainties about her identity.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

For a few months in the late 1970s, Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother, stepped outside their circumstances to become pals. Then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date, and she was never heard from again. Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him. The incident broke their friendship, and then Silas left town. Twenty years later Larry, a solitary mechanic, and Silas, who has returned as a constable, cross paths again, after another girl disappears.